Gravity

Push-Me, Pull-You
or 
"I'm Tellin' Ya, It's a Hell of a Story"

Gravity may just appear to you the shortest movie you've seen in awhile.  It lasts all of ninety minutes, but it rips by, despite long, leisurely takes where nothing much is happening (The opening shot alone is 17 minutes long without a traditional edit).  In that, it gets the yin-yang of space travel just so—floating at a relative leisurely pace while simultaneously moving at 16,000 mph, or as one test pilot describes the job—hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

Gravity pushes that out a bit, with many moments of sheer terror, but without some trumped up space monster hiding in lunar rocks (Apollo 18) or below the ice (Europa Station).  No, it doesn't need anything fancy.  It goes for the basics—a limitless indifferent Universe.

Up in space, aboard a futuristic space shuttle, terror comes by every 90 minutes or so, as a catastrophic collision between old Russian communication satellites causes a debris field hurtling by tearing holes through what ever fragile life-sustaining contraption we can put up there. Director Alfonso Cuarón (and his co-scenarist son Jonás) put the stakes right up front.  "Life in Space is Impossible."

They, then, spend the next 90 minutes destroying whatever faith in technology and science you might have.  It's an evangelist's dream come true.

That debris field starts out with a few little pieces, but like a cosmic game of "Asteroids" every collision creates more junk, sprays of it, and that just makes everything worse.  Space is our garbage field—Cuarón underpins the point by showing us all the junk—pens, screws, cuff-links ("cuff-links??")—floating in zero-g inside the space stations and capsules we put up there in some sort of mad attempt to make normal life in space.  It's a cosmic joke that after years of polluting the Earth, our garbage is making space uninhabitable (as if it ever was), too.

But, that's a lot of deep thought for after the film is over (as are some anomalies and plot conveniences).*  In the watching, Gravity is a fun-ride on so many levels, a visual romp and roller-coaster—the dialogue being mostly tangential and matter-of-fact—as the crew of the shuttle Explorer must deal with the fact that every 90 minutes their equipment is going to take a debilitating series of hits that might burst their protective bubbles just to survive.  The film is in mostly long, swooping stretches (the edits, interestingly, in dialogue situations), floating from one aspect to another, sometimes even violating the space of the astronaut's helmet, moving through the screen to get their perspective.  The novel aspect of this one is that the zero-gravity that science fictions films have recently taken pains to re-create or avoid has no restrictions in this scenario, there are no walls to bump into; if you go, you go until something stops you, slows you down, or retards your progress, and everything you do, pushes you in the opposite direction.  You can swim, but you'd better have an exit strategy for stopping, and spinning in place to turn around isn't going to help, because you're going to keep spinning.  And the series of catastrophes, hardships, and just plain pains-in-the-ass keep piling up one after the other, you would think it was Harold Lloyd up there.

Speaking of which, Gravity, besides the scrupulous pixelization of space, also boasts a dynamite sound experience.  In space, no one can hear dynamite, of course, but also no one can hear your thrusters whoosh-by, either, really. And Gravity is scrupulous about making sure you don't hear sounds in airless space, unless you absolutely have to.  Sounds are restricted to radio chatter (and interference) but also, only those sounds that would transmit through an astronaut's space-suit.  So, there are scenes where they're using power-tools? Only you don't hear the metallic grind of power-tools, you hear the vibration of the power-tools motors spinning.  But that's it.  Satellites get punctured, solar panels are torn off in bursts of shrapnel, but the most you hear is a muffled fwump if something impacts an astronaut, or vice versa.  And the theater I saw it in makes use of a Dolby system called ATMOS that pin-points where to put each particular sound as it careens through the theater.  It truly is an immersing experience in the theater.

For this space kid, despite some hokum here and there, it's the most fun I've had at the movies this year,** and someone is going to have to do something really exceptional to have better sound than this one.
  
Gravity is a Full-Price Ticket (Not only would I spring for 3-D, but try and see it in Dolby Atmos, for one of the craziest sound mixes I've ever heard).

* Three things, quibbles, anomalies, that are SPOILERS: 1) Sandra Bullock's hair is not plastered down on her head, but it's short, and would float around more than we see here (not a big deal, really, just a tech glitch, so the movie could get made); 2) At one point, we spend 10 minutes showing precisely how the whole friction-less world of Newton's laws of motion acts in zero-g, and then creates a cliffhanger situation that completely erases it, unnecessarily; and 3) Every 90 minutes that debris field shows up—IF everybody's in the same orbit, but one is STANDING STILL (which can't happen if you're actually orbiting) or they're going in opposite directions (at which point it would be every 45 minutes and very violently because they're colliding head-on).  As far as the plot conveniences, those are fairly obvious.

** There are some nice little in-jokes along the way.  My favorite: the unseen voice of Mission Control is Ed Harris, who played Flight Director Eugene Krantz in Apollo 13.  I could imagining him having conniption fits down on Earth: "Failure is NOT an option!" "Not on MY watch!"

The Way Back

"Strangers in a Strange Land"
or
"Every Journey Begins with the First Steppe"

A new Peter Weir film is something of an event.  The Aussie director of Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Year of Living Dangerously, Gallipoli, The Truman Show, Witness, and Master and Commander makes meticulous, thoughtful films of ambiguity and great beauty, throwing civilized men and women into clashes of culture (frequently more primitive) exploring the impact, with an eye towards the rough, otherworldly beauty of this world.  Along the way, you learn a lot even if the movie does not draw to a dramatic or philosophical conclusion.

So, with little fanfare, here is The Way Back, Weir's latest film, one that has been optioned many times since its source book, Slavomir Rawicz's "The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom," was published in 1956.  The veracity of the tale has been questioned a lot in that time, but the evidence is clear: four emaciated men walked into an Indian village, saying that they had walked from a Communist gulag in Siberia across the Gobi Desert and the Himalayas to freedom, a journey on-foot of 4,000 miles.  One could speculate—for the length of such a journey—why it had never come to the screen before:  too depressing—but think what it would do for soda and popcorn sales!; Elvis wasn't interested, indeed, what star would take on such a rugged movie, Burt Lancaster's brief interest notwithstanding; the movie has a lot of explaining to do about socio-political situations; the Russian market might not be too pleased with the film, and on and on.  Weir made it (reportedly for less than $30 million, which seems incredible), but so few studios were interested in it that it almost went straight to video...which would have been a shame, as this is one of those movies demanding to be seen on a big screen.

Janusz (Jim Sturgess) begins the film under interrogation in occupied Poland.  The year is 1940.  He has been turned in (reluctantly) by his wife under torture, and he is sent to a Soviet gulag in the mountainous regions of Siberia.  After a period of learning the ropes (and the whips of the guards and the barbed wire of the camp), he becomes a part of a loose group of prisoners of differing skills and supplies to make a fast surgical escape from the gulag and make their way to Mongolia.  Based on a loose plan of prisoner Khabarov (Mark Strong), they plan to make it to Lake Baikal, following it to the Sino-Russian railway.  Their supplies will run out in mere days, but Janusz is convinced they can live off the land, walking the entire way.  Among the group of escaping stragglers are "Mr. Smith" (Ed Harris)—"First name: Mister"—a particularly mysterious American (he tells Janusz, "you have a weakness I can use: kindness"), and, as it seems all movie escape attempts must have, a plays-by-his-own-rules maybe-criminal named Valka (Colin Farrell).  The group begins suspicious of each other, but soon forms a close-knit, surprisingly democratic structure, sharing ideas and resources, voting when they're at a crossroads—despite the occasional individual insurrection.

Watching the movie is a slog.  At 2 hours, 20 minutes, with the principal characters pushed to their endurance, the film feels longer than its running time, but one is never tempted to do a watch-check.  The Way Back is one of those films that keeps you guessing, intrigued and involved every minute, like you were involved in the long walk, craning to see what is around every corner.  Weir keeps the pace moving quickly, cutting scenes briskly from one episode to the next, so the film develops a natural rhythm.

But, it's the director's eye for detail—as always—that is striking, with scenes of stark, natural beauty that astonish: taking refuge in ancient caves, the camera pans up, following a bedraggled Mr. Smith's gaze, to two large holes in the ceiling, like the angry eyes of God; walking up a scrabble hill, Weir directs our view up and over the weary travelers to a screen-stretching shot of the expansive Gobi desert; at one point, they find a single solitary structure—a gate with no walls—absurdly marking their goal, while announcing another set-back.

It is a grueling adventure story with fine performances all around, interpreted through Weir's talent for keeping things real, even when they turn startlingly surreal.  Go prepared for a tough movie, but a satisfying one, that, like all escapes, becomes a journey of the individual will and spirit, covering all manner of obstacles in physical space, mental discipline, and the longest journey...of time.

The Way Back is a Full-Price Ticket. 

Copying Beethoven

"Copying Beethoven" (Agnieszka Holland, 2006) The story's pure hokum–there was no young female copyist to help Beethoven complete the parts for his Ninth Symphony in time for its premiere. Nor did she help him conduct it–Michael Umlauf, the theater's musical director helped the deaf composer keep the rhythm, in full sight of the audience, and not in hiding as this film would have you believe it.

But if one can get beyond the subterfuge (and it's the biggest crock of classical fiction since "Amadeus"), one can find a few things to recommend it. Diane Kruger, as copyist Anna Holtz, takes on "The Beast," and the herculean task of finishing the manuscript. The presentation of the music is all-important—as it should be—and Holland excells at the staging of that premiere for both Holtz and Beethoven becoming enraptured with the bond they share of his music. And Holland made a brilliant choice of picking Ed Harris to play Beethoven. Harris is an actor who likes to walk the edge and his Beethoven is a crazed, passionate misanthrope, always talking uncomfortably loud (due to his deafness) no matter the subject matter, but utterly un-ironic in speaking of his gift for the music that God sends into his head. The movie is worth seeing merely for his charged performance.

One thing that Holland does (and she mentions it in the commentary track as inspired) is to take the end of the film and start it with that—an unconventional approach that can lend suspense to a movie with a fore-gone conclusion. But here, there is no suspense: the sequence of Anna going to Beethoven's death-bed to tell him that she finally understands his last composition is all pictures and stray music and no explanation. Beethoven's goal was to communicate the natural sounds of the world in a musical presentation (that approaches jazz in its form!) and Holland juxtaposes her journey with images of the country-side with Beethoven's strange music accompanying it, communicating that Holtz "gets" it. It's disorienting, obtuse, and a terrible way to introduce an audience into the piece, robbing the film-goer of a proper beginning and a satisfying end.

Even Beethoven knew enough not to put the coda at the beginning.

Still, one can be thankful that the makers were wise enough not to make this a love story, ala "Immortal Beloved," and saved the mutual passion for the high fidelity of the music.

The Right Stuff

"The Right Stuff" (Philip Kaufman, 1979) Something of a miracle. Not just getting into Space. Making a movie of Tom Wolfe's distillation of the effort from the days of breaking the sound barrier post-WWII to the age of astronauts. Wolfe stripped away the Iron Curtain of PR flakkery to tell the story of the men who put their hides on the line to go farther, faster and higher than the earth-bound. And do so on "live" TV. Or in secret during a race for Space with the Russians. Wolfe opened the guarded doors of the test-pilot fraternity and told tales and punctured myths, while simultaneously creating myths anew—of the laconic "other" quality of pilots that pulled them out of scrapes, channeled their fear and kept them climbing the pyramid: the indefinable, ephemeral "right" stuff.

The book was optioned for the movies, but was considered too unwieldy and too expensive to turn into a film. But Philip Kaufman, one of the up-and-coming USC film-school grads took a bare-bones, low-tech approach to the effects, combined it with stock footage of the well-documented space program, and combined it with an irreverent sophomoric humor that combined Wolfe's myth-busting with SNL spoofery. But just as Wolfe found a new glory glowing inside the heart of the flummery he was burning away, Kaufman found interesting cinematic ways to illustrate those truths and celebrate the gung-ho heroism of a team of competing fly-boys. Chuck Yeager is a horse-riding cowboy of Western tradition riding in to town to take on a challenge. John Glenn's description of "fire-flies" while in orbit, is tied to the bonfires of Australian natives praying for his safe return. And in this stunning sequence, two disparate incidents from Wolfe's book unite the newly-beknighted Astronauts with their spiritual mentor and comrade-in-wings.

It starts with the arrival of a new test-jet—The Lockheed NF-104 Starfighter, which Yeager believes can break a record for altitude. With his wing-man, Ridley, he does an inspection of the jet working his way back to the exhaust port, which Kaufman pulls in on.

Kaufman takes us into the dark-hole of the jet-engine, and inside we hear echoing voices and whistles and the sound of drums, and before we can register the change, we're not in the negative space of the engine anymore, we've transitioned to another channelled tube of energy—we're traveling through a tunnel riding atop a limousine from an astronaut's perspective...

...as President Lyndon Johnson stands on a flag-draped stage and welcomes the seven Mercury astronauts to an out-sized barbecue in Houston--the new home for the Manned Space Center, as well as the astronauts and their families. Their homes, their furnishings are all paid for by the Houston developers who are benefitting from Johnson's earmarks. The Mercury 7 are living the good life, while the Man who Broke the Sound Barrier makes a run for space.

Both these incidents happened and are mentioned in Wolfe's book, but they took place months apart, while Kaufman has them happening simultaneously. To what purpose will become clear later, but in the meantime, we follow Yeager (Sam Shepard) as he vaults into the sky, his pilot's gear now more closely resembling the astronaut's flight-suits.

And in one spectacular shot, we see space bend and warp as we approach the feathery layer of a cloud-ceiling, then go through it...

...and the picture fades to an incident from that barbecue--an odd detail that Wolfe found funny and sad and a bit pathetic, but Kaufman turns into visual poetry. For some reason, the Houston event organizers chose as one of the entertainers stripper Sally Rand, now in her 60's, doing her famous "fan-dance" that had wowed 'em at the 1933 Chicago's World Fair. But that was thirty years previous. And the elderly Rand tottered around the stage. To what end, no one can say.

But Kaufman takes that incident and marries it with a running theme throughout the film. The Moon has been a beckoning image throughout "The Right Stuff," and now, as the clouds that Yeagher is punching through become the delicate feathers of Sally Rand's fans, she dances to an orchestral version of the melancholy "Clair deLune," by Debussey.

And it's lovely.

Kaufman stays on his images of empty space and feathers and lights, then to shots of the astronauts and their wives reacting to the irrelevence and embarrassment of it all. And then, something strange happens....

John Glenn (Ed Harris) looks over at fellow astronaut Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn), with whom he's had a contentious relationship...

...and Shepard's not even watching the stage-show. He's lost in thought...

...as is Deke Slayton (Scott Paulin).

Glenn turns to look at Gus Grissom (Fred Ward)...

...who is already looking at him.

Grissom turns and looks at his buddy, Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid)

...who is his usual grinning self, but he's subdued. We transition back to Sally Rand...

... and a blaze of klieg-lights to Yeager trying to "punch a hole in the sky."

Yeager reaches top altitude, then his engines give out and he's given one tantalizing glimpse of the stars in space...

...before his fighter-jet begins to rapidly tumble back to Earth.

Unable to bring it under control, Yeager makes a fiery ejection...

...and Kaufman holds on him--trailing smoke, because as we'll see his helmet is on fire--and we watch his long, long fall through space as he tumbles through the silence--a modern Icarus...

...who disappears into the clouds.

The clouds fade back to the feathers of Sally Rand.

...and to the astronauts, who are somewhere else.

Scott Carpenter (Charles Frank) begins to look pensive.

Walter Schirra (Lance Henriksen) acts like he hears something...

Glenn, on edge, looks to Grissom and Cooper...

Grissom is wary...

Cooper, head bowed, tentatively looks up...

as does Slayton...

And Shepard cranes his gaze to the ceiling...

We transition to Sally Rand, and on the soundtrack we hear a distant boom.

With a hard cut, we're back in the California desert.

Reverse angle to an ambulance approaching in the shimmering desert heat.

The driver points ahead "Sir? Is that a man?"

Amid the smoke and heat-waves, a silvery shape emerges.

"Yeah," says Ridley (Levon Helm), "you bet it is."

As the music swells, Yeager carrying his parachute, his face burned, but still chewing gum, approaches the ambulance.


Yeah. You bet it is. It's great film-making, too. And a brilliant sequence by Kaufman that shuffles real time a little, but makes a point about the competitiveness of air-men, giving way to a brotherhood. All of the men in the sequence have competed with each other as well as Yeager to be "at the top of the ol' pyramid," going faster and higher than any person before. The astronauts were test-pilots competing with Yeager, then signed on to become astronauts, "spam in a can" in the test-pilots' jargon, achieving a fame Yeager never would...until Wolfe's book...and this movie

Now at this Houston fete, the astronauts "tune in" to Yeager's struggle, as if linked. Backed by an echoing ochestral version of "Claire DeLune," it is haunting and haunted, communicating viscerally, if not literally, of the bond between the men—Indefinable.

"The Right Stuff."